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They’re growing up, but for the Indiana Hoosiers, it might be too little, too late.

It’s this simple for Tom Crean’s late-charging team: If they can beat Nebraska at home Wednesday and knock off Michigan in Ann Arbor on Saturday, they will have 19 wins, including a 9-9 record in the Big Ten, and will need only a win or two in the Big Ten Tournament to sneak into the side door of the NCAA Tournament.

If nothing else, though, there’s been growth.

Finally, after all this time, the Hoosiers are starting to look like a reasonable facsimile of a contending basketball team, starting with Yogi Ferrell and, of late, Big Ten Player of the Week Will Sheehey.

“I think we’re getting there, no question,” Tom Crean said Monday. “When I see the film, there’s still a lot of room for improvement. But the good thing about this team is what you start to do now is when you have to pinpoint two or three things, they’re really doing that now. The hard part with a younger team is when you don’t cover something every day or every other day, it’s as if you didn’t cover it for three or four weeks. I’m talking about some of the basic.

“But we’re starting to absorb more quickly and that’s a huge, huge thing.”

If the Hoosiers fall short of an NCAA Tournament berth – and it’s still just a long shot they will make it – this will properly be deemed a grave disappointment of a season. As much as they overachieved two seasons ago, they’ve underachieved that much this season. The young kids who were supposed to take that next step – notably Jeremy Hollowell and Hanner Mosquera-Perea – have made a minimal impact, and Peter Jurkin has done exactly nothing except take up space on the bench.

When I left for Sochi, they were an also-ran, losing to Northwestern, Purdue and Penn State. If all that wasn’t bad enough, Assembly Hall was literally falling apart. Toss in Mosquera-Perea’s drinking and driving charge, and you had a program in relative disarray. (And without knowing what kind of in-house discipline he’s received, it’s hard to judge whether Crean handled this smartly or not.)

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When I returned, they started knocking off ranked teams at Assembly Hall, looking like a team that might run out of season when it just starts to get things figured out. Not only did they beat Ohio State on Sunday without Noah Vonleh, but did it while assisting on 16 of 24 field goals, a rare sort of statistic for this team.

There are signs of hope:

- Austin Etherington has become a nice glue player.

- Stanford Robinson has emerged as the best of the freshman class, minus Noah Vonleh. (If he learns to shoot from the perimeter, a la Victor Oladipo, he’s going to be a special player.)

- Troy Williams, a freakish athlete, actually finished the Ohio State game, one of the few times this season Crean has trusted the freshman to remain in a close game until the end.

I asked Crean if this has been a frustrating season, both for what’s happened off the court and on it.

“I wouldn’t say frustrating, but you learn to attack issues so quickly, you can’t let things ever fester, whether it’s something off the court, sitting someone down, a lack of intensity,” he said. “It kind of makes coaching something you can’t live without. You get so used to dealing with things. But the only way your team is going to grow is dealing with the challenges.

“When you’re younger in coaching, you don’t always look at it that way. But as you get older, you realize it is that way. It’s just like parenting. You can get angry and you can get frustrated, but you better have a solution and you better get at it in a hurry.”

In some cases, a 19-10 record or thereabouts might be good enough to get a team on the bubble, but there’s a problem: IU played a horrific non-conference schedule. Some of that is dumb luck; two teams who figured to be decent, Washington and Notre Dame, fell on hard times. Some of that stems from the decision to play a lot of patsies, especially at home. That’s not going to impress anybody on the Selection Committee.

That, Crean said, should change next year and in the years to come.

“No question, it will be harder,” he said. “That said, it’s easy to look at it for where it is right now but when it was built, Washington was a strong team, certainly Notre Dame, but then they lost arguably their best player. You look at Oakland with their team coming back, you project a certain number of wins for them. The one thing we didn’t have was that really good non-conference home game we would have liked. We were waiting on a couple of things, especially with the Big East, and we were also looking at another neutral-court classic that never came to fruition.”

Next year, they’ll have the usual Big Ten-ACC Challenge, a game against a Big East team, Louisville in the Jimmy V Classic in New York, and a generally upgraded non-conference schedule, especially at home.

For this season, though, what’s important is, there’s still a pulse. There’s still hope. Not a lot of it – beating Michigan in Ann Arbor? – but there’s still a reason to stay interested. In the end, an improving Indiana team might just run out of basketball season.